George F. Will: It’s graduation time for disappointed little Lenins

“You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause.” – Randall Jarrell, “Pictures from an Institution‚” a 1954 novel.

In April 1917, Vladimir Lenin arrived by train in Russia, at Petrograd’s Finland Station. Hence the title of Edmund Wilson’s 1940 history of socialist thought: “To the Finland Station.” Noam Scheiber’s chronicle of young college graduates aspiring to overthrow sadness and capitalism should have been titled “To Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue Starbucks.” There the fuse was lit that led to … a book.

Scheiber’s “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class” is an overexcited presentation of a tragicomic phenomenon: a new, self-imagined proletariat’s revolution. The revolt is not against conditions akin to those in the “dark Satanic Mills” of early 19th century industrialism.

“Mutiny” usually denotes a rebellion of soldiers or sailors against a military authority. Against what comparable hierarchy are Scheiber’s little Lenins waging insurrections? Against Apple and Starbucks stores, and Hollywood studios. These boys and girls are hardly horny-handed sons and daughters of toil.

Although some were, Scheiber writes, “straining their tendons as they churned out … Frappuccinos.” Really. Page 56.

An unhappy employee of an Apple store consulted with an organizer for the International Association of Machinists union who had been, Scheiber says, “trying to unionize a group of yoga instructors.” Think about that: What banner would yoga instructors brandish at the barricades? Meet our demands (what are yoga instructors’ demands?) or we will strike, inflicting pain. (On whom? Of what sort?)

Disgruntled Starbucks workers embraced the United Auto Workers union, which they soon despised as too tepid about rectifying all injustices everywhere. Scheiber says the UAW now represents “roughly 100,000 higher-education workers” – graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty. Their numbers and grievances are growing faster than those of autoworkers.

Many Starbucks workers agitating for unionization were berating the company for an inadequate commitment to LGBTQ rights. Then, on Oct. 7, 2023, they fell in love with Hamas. One organizer wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with a portrait of Karl Marx. An Apple store employee, who blamed her declining mental health on “the job” and “the stress of unionizing,” became, Scheiber writes, so “desperate” she sold her two $150 tickets to a Beyoncé concert. An employee at a Baltimore-area Apple store: “I had to get rid of Hulu” (a video streaming service).

Blending labor activism with performance art, a Starbucks worker, who had a Western Michigan University degree in jewelry and metalsmithing, fashioned from chicken wire a Starbucks mermaid and a corporate lawyer. Scheiber says an employee “resisted Apple’s evaluation system because he believed performance-based bonuses” were inhumane. When Apple gave him stock, he sold it: “I don’t believe in owning stock.”

These arrested-development adolescents are silly. There is, however, a serious problem. Even before artificial intelligence erases many more entry-level jobs, the market for expensively credentialed (often not highly educated) young adults is saturated. Unions, which represent only 6% of private-sector employees, are irrelevant to ameliorating this problem.

There is a growing subset of graduates who, propelled by the applause of grade inflation, emerge from the political monoculture of campuses with high grades, low learning and a talent for blaming. They blame capitalism, markets, society, something for their frustrations and disappointments. Their vast sense of entitlement includes an assumed exemption from common life experiences.

Many supposedly underemployed graduates are casualties of the siren call of “college for all.” This gave the political class something more to subsidize, and gave the academic industry opportunities to raise tuition, siphoning up the subsidies to fund expansions. Thus were millions of young people lured onto an expensive – in time and money – path away from well-paid and satisfying trades, and into a curdled adulthood nursing vague grievances about foregone status.

The predictable result of market saturation resulted in a 2024 report that 45% of graduates held, 10 years after graduation, jobs that do not “require” a college degree. But the meaning of this is murky.

How many jobs require what, exactly, that is guaranteed to come from, or comes only from, college? Harry Truman had no degree. Of the many baristas who today have degrees, how many have college-acquired talents that the market inexplicably fails to recognize as capable of adding substantial value to the economy?

’Tis commencement season. Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” wafts over many college graduates commencing – to the extent that Scheiber’s subjects are typical – a long journey into disappointment. As such people multiply, so does the infantilism called socialism.